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 <updated>2006-04-26T20:10:25-08:00</updated>
 <author><name>Tim Bray</name></author>
 <subtitle>ongoing fragmented essay by Tim Bray</subtitle>
 <rights>All content written by Tim Bray and photos by Tim Bray Copyright Tim Bray, some rights reserved, see /ongoing/misc/Copyright</rights>
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<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>
 <title>Spring in White on White</title>
 <link href='Spring-in-White-on-White' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Spring-in-White-on-White</id>
 <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-26T20:10:16-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Garden' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Garden' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Most people would generally prefer a climate where it&#x2019;s bright and warm most of the time. But for Canadians and others who live where it&#x2019;s not, there are compensations, and one is the experience of spring.  I have a picture.</div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Most people would generally prefer a climate where it’s bright
and warm most of the time. But for Canadians and others who live where it’s
not, there are compensations, and one is the experience of
spring.  I have a picture.</p>
<img src="IMGP3247.png" alt="Pear blossoms against cherry blossoms" />
<div class="caption"><p>The blossoms are pear in the foreground, cherry behind.</p></div>
<p>After all the months of 50° North Latitude winter—icy-sharp in most
of Canada, wet and dark here in Vancouver—the soul, the spirit, and the
libido all spring to life when the sun comes back.  We’ve had a solid year of
crappy weather, but this last Saturday through Monday were solidly summery,
bright 
and warm; and in this season the days are already long and each gets
longer so fast you can feel it.</p>
<p>On the back porch, our pear tree’s branches were silhouetted against the
neighbors’ big wild old cherry; the cherry yields no edible fruit but who
cares, it’s beautiful
tree any time of year.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>
 <title>Scott</title>
 <link href='Scott' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Scott</id>
 <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-26T20:06:50-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business/Sun' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>I’ve been watching our internal leadership conference and spending quite a
bit of time talking in the virtual hallways, and I’ve been surprised at
the intensity of feeling about Mr. McNealy.  Yes, there are those
here saying “About bloody time, now we can make some progress” but there’s a
much bigger group that is genuinely emotional about this transition.
Maybe it’s a function of seniority: I never met nor corresponded with Scott, and
he hasn’t been
much of a presence in the company’s conversation in the time I’ve been here.
But there are a lot of smart, seasoned, unsentimental people making it clear
that 
he’s been a major force in their lives, at a more personal level than I’m
used to hearing when people speak about executives.  I guess also that to a
lot of people, Sun’s vision, for which Scott gets some of the credit, was a
radical and wonderful thing.   I first used Unix in 1979 and quit a nice
big-company job
to become a VAX-bsd sysadmin in 1983, so I’ve always kind of
lived inside that vision.
But I’ll tell you one thing, what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days
makes me really regret that I didn’t get to know Scott.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>
 <title>Jacobs, Pictures, Spartans</title>
 <link href='Jane-Jacobs' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Jane-Jacobs</id>
 <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-26T17:28:59-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs">Jane Jacobs</a> died;
the city I live in, Vancouver, is pretty solidly Jacobsian both in its current
shape and its planning dogma.  By choosing to live here I’m empirically a
fan.  Oddly, few have remarked how great Jacobs
<em>looked</em>; her face commanded the eye.  Which leads me Alex
Waterhouse-Hayward’s wonderful 
<a href="http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/2006/04/jane-jacobs-viveca-lindfors_26.html">Jane Jacobs &amp; Viveca Lindfors</a>;
surprising portraits and thoughts on decoration.  W-H’s blog has become one of
only two or three that I 
stab at excitedly whenever I see something new.  For example, see 
<a href="http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/archives/2006_04_01_archive.html#114476408248660848">Sex Crimes, Homicide and Drugs</a>
and yes, that’s what it’s about.
Staying with the death-and-betrayal theme, and apparently (but not really)
shifting back 2&#xbd; millennia, see John Cowan’s
<a href="http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/04/war-after-simonides.html">The
War (after Simonides)</a>, being careful to look closely at the links.
I’ve
<a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/24/Herodotus">written</a>
about those same wars.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/25/'>
 <title>LAMP and MARS</title>
 <link href='Scaling-Rails' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/25/Scaling-Rails</id>
 <published>2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-26T07:24:06-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Sun' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>At
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/13/RoR">that Rails conference</a>, when I
was
<a href="http://blog.garbledygook.com/2006/04/17/ruby-on-rails-podcast-tim-bray-ruby-on-rails-podcast/">talking</a>
to
<a href="http://jroller.com/page/obie">Obie Fernandez</a>, he asked, more or
less “How can Sun love us?  We’re not Java” and I said, more or less, “Hey,
you’re programmers, you write software and there have to be computers to run
it, we sell computers, why wouldn’t we love you?”  Anyhow, we touched on
parallelism a bit and I talked up the
<a href="http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/">T1</a>; 
Obie took that ball and 
<a href="http://jroller.com/page/obie?entry=will_ultrasparc_t1_emerge_as">ran with it</a>,
saying all sorts of positive things about synergy between Rails’
shared-nothing architecture and our multicore systems.  Yeah, well, good in
theory, but I’m too old to make that kind of prediction without running some
tests.  Hah, it turns out that
<a href="http://joyent.com/">Joyent</a> has been
<a href="http://scalewithrails.com/">doing that</a>, and have
<a href="http://scalewithrails.com/downloads/ScaleWithRails-April2006.pdf">76
PDF slides</a> on the subject.
If you care about big-system scaling issues, read the whole thing; a little
long, but amusing and with hardly any bullet lists.  If you’re a Sun
shareholder looking for a pick-me up, check out slides 40-41, 49, and 52-74.
Oh, I gather that the T1, Solaris, and ZFS are OK for Java too.
<i>[Update: The title was just “SAMR”, as in LAMP with two new letters.  
Enough people didn’t get it that I was forced to think about it, and MARS
works better anyhow.]</i></p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/25/'>
 <title>Real-Time Journalism</title>
 <link href='Talk-With-Berlind' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/25/Talk-With-Berlind</id>
 <published>2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-26T06:40:19-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Journalism' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Journalism' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Syndication' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Syndication' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>I got email late yesterday from
<a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/bio.php#berlind">David Berlind</a>: “Hey, can
I call you for a minute?”  He wanted commentary on
<a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2906">a story he was writing</a> that I
think is about the potential for intellectual-property lock-ins on RSS and Atom
extensions.  I say “I think is about” because the headline is “Will or could
RSS get forked?”.  After a few minutes’ chat, David asked if he could record
for a podcast, and even though I only had a cellphone, the audio came out OK.
The conversation was rhythmic: David brought up a succession of potential
issues and answered each along the lines of “Yes, it’s reasonable to worry
about that, but in this 
case I don’t see any particular problems.”  
Plus I emitted a mercifully-brief rant on the difference between protocols,
data, and software.
On the one hand, I thought David could have been a 
little clearer that I was pushing back against the thrust of his story, but on
the other hand he included the whole conversation right
there in the piece, so anyone who actually cares can listen and find out what
I actually said, not what I think I said nor what David reported I said.
I find this raw barely-intermediated journalism (we
talk on the phone this afternoon, it’s on the Web in hours) a little
shocking still.
On balance, it’s better than the way we used to do things.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>
 <title>The Transition Explained</title>
 <link href='CEO-Transition' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/CEO-Transition</id>
 <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-24T16:49:05-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business/Sun' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>It’s not that complicated, really.
Bloggers are
<a href="http://www.sun.com/2006-0418/js/index.jsp">taking over the world</a>.
Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>
 <title>5&#x272d;&#x266b;: One More Cup of Coffee</title>
 <link href='One-More-Cup-Of-Coffee' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/One-More-Cup-Of-Coffee</id>
 <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Music/Recordings' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Music' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Recordings' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Music/5 Stars' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='5 Stars' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I&#x2019;m not really a <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan'>Bob Dylan</a> fan.  A voice like that, and a tunesmithing talent like that, come along only a few times per century, but he&#x2019;s still kind of irritating. That aside, the song <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite>, from the 1976 album <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_%28album%29'>Desire</a>, can&#x2019;t be ignored; wonderful tune, wonderful orchestration, wonderful performance. <i>(&#x201c;5&#x272d;&#x266b;&#x201d; series introduction <a href='/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music'>here</a>; with <a href='/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music#p-1'>an explanation</a> of why the title may look broken.)</i></div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>I’m not really a
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan">Bob Dylan</a> fan.  A voice
like that, and a tunesmithing talent like that, come along only a few times
per century, but he’s still kind of irritating.
That aside, the song <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite>, from the 1976 album
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_%28album%29">Desire</a>, can’t be
ignored; wonderful tune, wonderful orchestration, wonderful performance.
<i>(“5✭♫” series introduction <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music">here</a>;
with <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music#p-1">an
explanation</a> of why the title may look broken.)</i></p>
<img src="Desire.png" class="inline" alt="Desire, by Bob Dylan" />
<h2 id='p-1'>The Context</h2>
<p>Nothing I can possibly write will add any wisdom to the
millions of words, some 90% of them in excess of needs, written on the subject
of this particular person.</p>
<p>A personal statement: Bob Dylan has long irritated me for, during the first
thirty years or 
so of his career, never having given a straight answer to a straight question,
and for writing songs with dozens of boring verses.  But they’ll still be
listening 
to lots of his performances long after I’m dead, and in recent years he’s
become a better, more direct, interview.</p>
<p>My taste in Dylan is a little unusual: once you get past <cite>One More Cup
of Coffee</cite>, my favorites would be <cite>Baby Let Me Follow You
Down</cite> (from the <cite>Last Waltz</cite> soundtrack) and 
<cite>Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)</cite> from
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basement_Tapes">The Basement
Tapes</a>.</p>
<p><cite>Desire</cite>, the record, is hit and miss. <cite>Joey</cite>,
glorification of the life of some mafioso, is flawed in concept
and unlistenable in execution.  <cite>Hurricane</cite>, whatever you think
about
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter">Mr. Carter</a>, that song
rocks; and <cite>Isis</cite> hits pretty hard too.</p>
<h2 id='p-2'>The Music</h2>
<p>Is there anything in <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite> that’s not
perfect?  Well yes, in the verses, the
lyrics on occasion drag (“He oversees his kingdom / So no stranger does
intrude / His voice it trembles as he calls out / For another plate of food”).
But apart from that, the sentiment is compelling,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Rivera">Scarlet Rivera’s</a>
violin is beautifully scored and played, the tune is to die for, and the
backing vocals are by Emmylou Harris, who you can bet is going to be here in
the 5-✭ series one of these days.
And while there’s not much middle ground on the subject of Dylan’s singing, if
you like it, you’ll <em>really</em> like this song.</p>
<p>Listen to the choruses: Bob and Emmylou veer wildly around the rhythm, then
coalesce on the beat when it matters, and they’re making it
up as they go along, they’re wholly inhabiting the moment, and it’s
quite, quite perfect.</p>
<h2 id='p-3'>Sampling It</h2>
<p>Oh yeah, it’s out there.  And there’s a live version too; but the smart
thing  would be to go buy the un-compressed un-DRM’ed shiny round silver
version of <cite>Desire</cite>; it’s a keeper.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>
 <title>Atomic Monday</title>
 <link href='Atomic-Monday' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/Atomic-Monday</id>
 <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-24T00:44:06-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Syndication' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Syndication' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Atom' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Atom' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>First of all, implementors of anything Atom-related need to spend some time
<a href="http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000793.html">chez
Jacques Distler</a>; in particular, the conversation that plays out in the
comments. Second, there’s this piece of software called
<a href="http://www.planetplanet.org/">Planet Planet</a> that allows you to
make an aggregate web page by reading lots of feeds; for example, see
<a href="http://www.planetapache.org/">Planet Apache</a> or
<a href="http://planetsun.org/">Planet Sun</a>.
Sam Ruby decided that its Atom support needed some work, so
<a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/04/23/Adding-Atom-support-to-PlanetPlanet">he did
it</a>.  Now, here’s the exciting part: he pinged me over the weekend and said
“Hey, look at this” wanting to show me his cleverly-Atomized
Planet Intertwingly feed. 
I looked at it in
<a href="http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/">NetNewsWire</a> and was puzzled for
a moment; some but not all of the 
things in the feed were highlighted as unread, even though this was the first
time I’d seen it.  Then the light went on. 
This
is Atom doing <em>exactly what we went to all that trouble to make it do</em>.
NetNewsWire has good Atom support and, because Atom entries all have unique
IDs and timestamps,  it can
tell that it’s seen lots of those entries before in other feeds that I
subscribe to.  That’s how I found Jacques’ piece.  This is huge; anyone who
uses synthetic or aggregated feeds knows that dupes are a big problem, showing
up all over the place.
No longer, Atom makes that problem go away.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>
 <title>Hyatt on the High-Res Web</title>
 <link href='High-Res-Web' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/High-Res-Web</id>
 <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-23T17:12:18-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Presentation' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Presentation' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Check out Dave Hyatt’s
<a href="http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=55">excellent write-up</a> on
designing and rendering Web pages so they take advantage of the
higher-resolution screens that <em>may</em> be coming our way. 
I emphasize “may” because I’ve seen how slowly we’ve picked up pixels over
the years. The first really substantial screen I ever worked on was a
1988-vintage Sun workstation with about a million pixels.  The Mac on my
lap right now, which has 125 times as much memory as that workstation, has
only 1.38 million pixels.
Anyhow, Hyatt has some smart things to say on the issues,
which are trickier than you might think.  I suspect that sometime in a couple of
years, if I still care about <span class='o'>ongoing</span>, I’m  going to
have to go back and reprocess all the images so that higher-res versions are
available for those who have the screens and don’t mind downloading bigger
files. 
Anyhow, Dave’s piece may be slightly misleading in that he talks about SVG
as though 
it’s something coming in the future.  Not so, check out
<a href="http://zcorpan.1go.dk/sandbox/svg/atom/.xml">this nifty SVG Atom
logo</a>, which works fine in all the Mozilla browsers I have here.
Load it up, resize the window, and watch what happens.  Then do a “view
source”.
<i>[Update:
<a href="http://blog.codedread.com">Jeff Schiller</a> writes to tell me that
Opera 9 does SVG (and Opera 8 “SVG Tiny”) too.]
[<a href="http://www.freeke.org/ffg">Dave Walker</a> writes: Though the shipping version of Safari doesn’t support SVG,
<a href="http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/Latest-WebKit-SVN.dmg">the
nightlies</a> do.]
[<a href="http://www.davelemen.com/archives/2006/04/is_it_time_for_jpeg_2000_to_go_mainstream.html">Dave Lemen</a>
points to
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG-2000">JPEG 2000</a> as possibly
useful in a high-res context.]</i></p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/23/'>
 <title>Wrong About the Infield Fly Rule</title>
 <link href='Wrong-About-the-Infield-Fly-Rule' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/23/Wrong-About-the-Infield-Fly-Rule</id>
 <published>2006-04-23T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-23T15:02:41-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Family' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Family' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>My brother
<a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/">Rob</a> is really taking to
this blogging medium.  Check out his recent
<a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/2006/04/credo.html">Credo</a>,
and also the only instance I’ve seen of
<a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/2006/04/ode-to-96-chevy-lumina.html">Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry</a>
applied to a mini-van.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2004/12/12/'>
 <title>Statistics</title>
 <link href='BMS' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/12/12/BMS</id>
 <published>2004-12-12T12:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-23T10:10:02-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Publishing' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Publishing' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Almost every Sunday I grab the week&#x2019;s <span class="o">ongoing</span> logfiles and update my numbers. I find it interesting and maybe others will too, so  this entry is now the charts&#x2019; permanent home. I&#x2019;ll update it most weeks, probably. <i>[Updated: 2006/04/23.]</i></div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Almost every Sunday I grab the week’s <span class='o'>ongoing</span>
logfiles and update my numbers.
I find it interesting
and maybe others will too, so 
this entry is now the charts’ permanent home. I’ll update it most weeks,
probably.
<i>[Updated: 2006/04/23.]</i></p>
<img src="Browser-Market-Share.png" alt="Browser market shares at ‘ongoing’" />
<div class="caption"><p>Browsers visiting <span class='o'>ongoing</span>,
percent.</p></div>
<img src="Browsers-via-search.png" alt="Browser market shares at ‘ongoing’, visitors via search engines" />
<div class="caption"><p>Browsers visiting <span class='o'>ongoing</span> via
search engines, percent.</p></div>
<img src="Search-Engines.png" alt="Search engine market shares at ‘ongoing’" />
<div class="caption"><p>Search referrals to <span
class='o'>ongoing</span> .</p></div>
<img src="Feeds.png" alt="RSS and Atom feed fetches" />
<div class="caption"><p>Fetches of the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds.</p></div>
<p>The notes on usage and source code will return in coming weeks when I get
the cycles to rewrite this whole article.</p>
<h2 id='p-1'>What a “Hit” Means</h2>
<p>I recently
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/07/Thumbnail">updated</a> the
<a href="/ongoing/misc/Colophon"><span class='o'>ongoing</span> software</a>
(but haven’t updated the Colophon I see, oops).
Anyhow, the <code>XMLHttpRequest</code> now issued by each page seems to be a
pretty reliable counter of the number of actual browsers with humans behind
them reading the pages.  I checked against
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/04/Google-Analytics">Google Analytics</a>
and the numbers agreed to within a dozen or two on days with 5,000 to 10,000
page views; interestingly, Google Analytics was always 10 or 20 views
higher.</p>
<p>Anyhow, do <em>not</em> conclude that now I know how many people are
reading whatever it is I write here; because I publish lots of short pieces
that are all there in my RSS feed, and anyone reading my Atom feed gets the
full content of everything.
I and I have <em>no #&amp;*!$ idea</em> how many people look at my feeds.</p>
<p>By the way, this was the first time in weeks and weeks that I’d looked at the
Analytics numbers, and they showed almost exactly zero change from the report
linked above.  So I’m going to turn them off; they’re a little too intrusive
and I think may be slowing page loads.</p>
<p>Anyhow, I ran some detailed statistics on the traffic for Wednesday,
February 8th, 2006.</p>
<table cellspacing="3" cellpadding="2" class="wltable">
<tr valign="top"><td>Total connections to the server</td><td align="right">180,428</td></tr>
<tr valign="top"><td>Total successful GET transactions</td><td align="right">155,507</td></tr>
<tr valign="top"><td>Total fetches of the RSS and Atom feeds</td><td align="right">88,450</td></tr>
<tr valign="top"><td>Total GET transactions that actually fetched data (i.e. status code
200 as opposed to 304)</td><td align="right">87,271</td></tr>
<tr valign="top"><td>Total GETs of actual ongoing pages (i.e. not CSS, js, or
images)</td><td align="right">18,444</td></tr>
<tr valign="top"><td>Actual human page-views</td><td align="right">6,348</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>So, there you have it.  Doing a bit of rounding, if you take the 180K
transactions and subtract the 90K feed fetches and the 6000 actual human page
views, you’re left with 84,000 or so “Web overhead” transactions, mostly
stylesheets and graphics and so on.
For every human who viewed a page, it was fetched almost twice again by
various kinds of robots and non-browser automated agents.</p>
<p>It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/18/'>
 <title>XML Automaton</title>
 <link href='XML-Grammar' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/18/XML-Grammar</id>
 <published>2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-23T08:25:56-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/XML' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='XML' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Coding' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Coding' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>In December of 1996 I released a piece of software called <a href='http://www.textuality.com/Lark/'>Lark</a>, which was the world&#x2019;s first <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-xml-proc'>XML Processor</a> (as the term is defined in the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/'>XML Specification</a>). It was successful, but I stopped maintaining it in 1998 because lots of other smart people, and some big companies like Microsoft, were shipping perfectly good processors.  I never <em>quite</em> open-sourced it, holding back one clever bit in the moronic idea that I could make money out of Lark somehow. The magic sauce is a finite state machine that can be used to parse XML 1.0. Recently, someone out there needed one of those, so I thought I&#x2019;d publish it, with some commentary on Lark&#x2019;s construction and an amusing anecdote about the name. I doubt there are more than twelve people on the planet who care about this kind of parsing arcana. <i>[Rick Jelliffe  <a href='http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/04/xml_in_xml.html'>has upgraded</a> the machine].</i></div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>In December of 1996 I released a piece of software called
<a href="http://www.textuality.com/Lark/">Lark</a>, which was
the world’s first
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-xml-proc">XML Processor</a> (as the
term is defined in the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/">XML Specification</a>).
It was successful, but I stopped maintaining it in 1998 because lots of other
smart people, and some big companies like Microsoft, were shipping perfectly
good processors.  I never <em>quite</em> open-sourced it, holding back one
clever bit in the moronic idea that I could make money out of Lark somehow.
The magic sauce is a finite state machine that can be used to parse XML 1.0.
Recently, someone out there needed one of those, so I thought I’d publish
it, with some commentary on Lark’s construction and an amusing anecdote about
the name.
I doubt there are more than twelve people on the planet who care about
this kind of parsing arcana.
<i>[Rick Jelliffe 
<a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/04/xml_in_xml.html">has
upgraded</a> the machine].</i></p>
<h2 id='p-1'>Why “Lark”?</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren</a> and I went to
Australia in late 1996 to visit her mother and to get married, which we
did on November 30th.  Forty-eight hours later, Lauren twisted her knee
badly enough that she was pretty well
confined to a sofa for the rest of our Australian vacation.</p>
<p>So I broke out my computer and finished the work I’d already started on my
XML processor, and decided to call it Lark for <b>La</b>uren’s <b>R</b>ight
<b>K</b>nee.</p>
<h2 id='p-2'>How Lark Worked</h2>
<p>Lark was a pure
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_state_machine">deterministic
finite automaton</a> (DFA)
parser, with a little teeny state stack.
Some of its transitions were labeled with named “events” that would provoke
the parser to do something if, for example, it had just recognized a start tag
or whatever.</p>
<p>DFA-driven parsers are a common enough design pattern, although I think
Lark is the only example in the XML space.
There are well-known parser generators such as
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc">yacc</a>, 
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_bison">GNU bison</a>, and
<a href="https://javacc.dev.java.net/">javacc</a>,
usually used in combination with lexical scanners such as
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_lexical_analyser">flex</a> so that
you can write your grammar in terms of tokens not characters.
Also, they handle LALR langauges, so the parsing technique is quite a bit
richer than a pure state machine.</p>
<p>I thought I had a better idea.  The grammar of XML is simple
enough, and the syntax characters few enough, that I thought I could just
write down the state machine by hand.
So that’s what I did, inventing a special-purpose DFA-description
language for the purpose.</p>
<p>Then I had a file called <code>Lark.jin</code> which was really a Java
program that used the state machine to parse XML.  The transition “events”
in the machine were mapped to <code>case</code> labels in a huge
<code>switch</code> construct.  Then there was a horrible, <em>horrible</em>
Perl program that read the <code>Lark.jin</code> and the automaton,
generated the DFA tables in Java syntax, inserted them into the code and 
produced <code>Lark.java</code>, which you actually compiled
to make the parser.</p>
<p>So while Java doesn’t have a preprocessor, Lark did, which made quite a few
things easier.</p>
<p>There were a lot of tricks; some of the state transitions 
weren’t on characters, they were on XML character classes such as
<code>NameChar</code> and so on.
This made the automaton easier to write, and in fact, to keep the class files
small, the character-class transitions persisted into the Java form, and the
real DFA was built at startup time.
These days, quick startup might be more important than <code>.class</code>
file size.</p>
<h2 id='p-3'>What Was Good</h2>
<p>It was <em>damn</em> fast.  James Clark managed to hand-craft a
Java-language XML parser called
<a href="http://jclark.com/xml/xp/index.html">XP</a> that was a little faster
than Lark, but he did that by clever I/O buffering, and I was determined to
leapfrog him by improving my I/O.</p>
<p>This was before the time of standardized XML APIs, but Lark had a stream API
that influenced SAX, and a DOM-like tree API; both worked just fine.
Lark is one of very few parsers ever to have survived the
<a href="http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/303509/2002-12-13/2002-12-19/0">billion
laughs attack</a>.</p>
<p>Lark was put into production in quite a few deployments, and the flow of
bug reports slowed to a trickle.
Then in 1998 I noticed that IBM and Microsoft and BEA and everyone else
were building XML Processors, so I decided that it wasn’t worthwhile 
maintaining mine.</p>
<h2 id='p-4'>What Was Bad</h2>
<p>I never got around to teaching it namespaces, which means it wouldn’t be
real useful today.</p>
<p>It had one serious bug that would have been real work to fix and since
nobody ever encountered it in practice, I kept putting it off and never did.
If you had an internal parsed entity reference in an attribute value and the
replacement text included the attribute delimiter (<code>'</code> or
<code>"</code>), it would scream and claim you had a busted XML document.</p>
<h2 id='p-5'>That Automaton</h2>
<p>What happened was,
<a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1712">Rick Jelliffe</a>, who is a
Good Person, was 
<a href="http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200604/post30110.html">looking for
a FSM for XML</a> and I eventually noticed, and so I sent him mine.</p>
<p>There’s no reason whatsoever to keep it a secret: 
<a href="/ongoing/code/lark/com/textuality/autom.txt">here it is</a>.
Be warned: it’s ugly.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there were only 227 states and 8732 transitions, so the state
number fit into a 
byte; that and the associated event index pack into a short.
To make things even tighter, the transitions were only keyed by characters up
to 127, as in 7-bit ASCII.
Characters higher than that can’t be XML syntax characters, so we’re only
interested whether they fall into classes like <code>NameChar</code> and
<code>NameStartChar</code> and so on.  A 64K <code>byte[]</code> array takes
care of that, each byte having a class bitmask.</p>
<p>As a result of all this jiggery-pokery, the DFA ends up, believe it
or not, constituting a <code>short[227][128]</code>.</p>
<p>Here’s a typical chunk of the automaton:</p>
<pre><code>1. # in Start tag GI
2. State StagGI BustedMarkup {in element type}
3. T $NameC StagGI
4. T $S InStag !EndGI
5. T > InDoc !EndGI !ReportSTag
6. T / EmptyClose !EndGI</code></pre>
<p>This state, called <code>StagGI</code>, is the state where we’re actually
reading the name of a tag, we got here by seeing a <code>&lt;</code> followed
by a <code>NameStart</code> character.<br/>
Line 1 is a comment.<br/>
In line 2 we name the state, and support error reporting, providing the name
of another state to fall back into in case of error, and in the curly braces,
some text to help build an error message.<br/>
Line 3 says that if we see a valid XML Name character, we just stay in this
state.<br/>
Line 4 says that if we see an XML space character, we move to state
<code>InStag</code> and process an <code>EndGI</code> event, which would stash
the characters in the start tag.<br/>And so on.</p>
<h2 id='p-6'>Other Hackery</h2>
<p>An early cut of Lark used String and StringBuffer objects to hold all the
bits and pieces of the XML.  This might be a viable strategy today, but in
1996’s Java it was painfully slow. 
So the code goes to heroic lengths to live in the land of character arrays at
all times, making Strings only when a client program asks for one through the
API.  The performance difference was mind-boggling.</p>
<h2 id='p-7'>An Evil Idea</h2>
<p>If you look at the automaton, and the Lark code, at least half—I’d bet
three quarters—is there to deal with parsing the DTD and then dealing with
entity wrangling.
A whole bunch more is there to support DOM-building and walking.</p>
<p>I bet if I went through and simply removed support for anything coming out
of the <code>&lt;!DOCTYPE></code>, including all entity processing, 
then discarded
the DOM stuff, then added namespace support and SAX and StAX APIs, it would be
less than half its current size.  
Then if I reworked the I/O, knowing what I know now and stealing some tricks
that James Clark uses in
<a href="http://expat.sourceforge.net/">expat</a>, I bet it would
be the fastest Java XML parser on the planet for XML docs without a
DOCTYPE; by a wide margin.  It’s hard to beat a DFA.</p>
<p>And it would still be fully XML 1.0 compliant.  Because (snicker) this is
Java, and your basic core Java now includes an XML parser, so I could simply
instrument Larkette to buffer the prologue and if it saw a DOCTYPE with an
internal subset, defer to Java’s built-in parser.</p>
<p>I’ll probably never do it.  But the thought brings a smile to my face.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>
 <title>Just A Kid</title>
 <link href='Just-a-Kid' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/Just-a-Kid</id>
 <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-22T13:37:58-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Food and Drink' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Food and Drink' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Last weekend, Lauren felt like cooking up home-made Easter eggs, so
the shopping list included “chocolate chips (large bag)”.  I was heading down
the bulk-foods aisle and realized one of the vertical acrylic bins was full of
them.  Someone had been sloppy, and there was a little heap of chocolate chips
on the shelf underneath it.  For a second, I flashed into pure eight-year-old
mode, thinking “Holy cow, there’s a <em>whole bin</em> full of chocolate
chips, and more just lying there!”  I popped a few in my mouth and they were
excellent; semi-sweet, dark, strong, and firm.  I was still in the state that
Buddhists don’t mean when they say “Child’s Mind”, thinking “I
can get as many as I want!”  The list did say “large bag” after all, so I put
a bag under the spout and gleefully jammed the lever <em>all the way
over</em>.  At home, Lauren said “You went overboard, a bit, didn’t you?”
and now we have a plastic canister-full in the pantry which should last us
into 2007.  It’s a good feeling.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>
 <title>Goddess</title>
 <link href='Goddess' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/Goddess</id>
 <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-22T12:25:59-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Family' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Family' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Microsoft' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Microsoft' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>That would be my wife 
<a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren</a>.  After 
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/16/Mad-at-Microsoft">I b0rked</a> our
Win2K gamebox, I tried re-installing the OS and eventually reduced it to
complete brick-ness, it recognized neither the video adapter nor the network
card.  So Lauren brushed me aside and started wrestling with the problem, and
to make a long story short, it almost completely works again.  At one point
she seemed nearly infinite in her capabilities, sitting in front of the
computer wrangling software updates while knitting baby stuff and looking up
words in a German dictionary for the kid’s homework.  Some of the German nouns
and muttered curses at the Windows install sounded remarkably like each other.
Why would anyone not marry a geek?  The only problem is that Win2K won’t
auto-switch resolutions to play games any more, it gets the frequency wrong
and the LCD goes pear-shaped, you have to hand-select the frequency and
switch into the right resolution first.  LazyWeb?</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/21/'>
 <title>Routing Around Spotlight</title>
 <link href='Routing-Around-Spotlight' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/21/Routing-Around-Spotlight</id>
 <published>2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-21T23:16:25-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Mac OS X/Gripes' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Mac OS X' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Gripes' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Herewith two hideously ugly little shell scripts for use when Spotlight refuses to search your mail. Spotlight is a flawed v1.0 implementation of a really good idea and will, I&#x2019;m sure, be debugged in a near-future release. <i>[Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]</i></div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Herewith two hideously ugly little shell scripts for use when Spotlight
refuses to search your mail.
Spotlight is a flawed v1.0 implementation of a really good idea and will, I’m
sure, be debugged in a near-future release.
<i>[Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]</i></p>
<p>My problem is that whereas Mail.app will search my To/From/Subject
lines (slowly, and with a
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/20/UnTiger">really irritating GUI</a>),
the “Entire Message” option just doesn’t work, it returns instantly with no
results.  Yes, I’ve read the hints about making Spotlight re-index,
but it just flatly refuses to work for me.  Mind you, I have a lot of
email, but still, it should at least try.</p>
<p>It turns out I had never really figured out the <code>-print0</code> and
<code>-0</code> idioms that a lot of the shell-command stalwarts now have.
Thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for raising my consciousness.</p>
<p>This lives in <code>$HOME/bin</code> under the name
<code>mailgrep</code>:</p>
<pre><code>#!/bin/sh
find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx' -print0 | \
  xargs -0 fgrep -i $@</code></pre>
<p>Isn’t <code>xargs</code> a funny command?  I’ve discovered that it’s nearly
impossible to describe what does, and then why what it does is necessary, but
there are just a whole bunch of places where you’d be lost without it.</p>
<p>This lives in <code>$HOME/bin/mailview</code>:</p>
<pre><code>#!/bin/sh
find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx'  -print0 | \
  xargs -0 fgrep -i -l -Z $@ | \
  xargs -0 open</code></pre>
<p>The first cut of this dodged <code>xargs</code> and used an
incredibly-inefficient and slow chain of <code>-exec</code> arguments to open
the files one at a time with 
<code>view</code> (aka <code>vim</code>), to work around 
a well-known <code>vim</code> misfeature; it complained about the input
not being a terminal and left my Terminal.app keystrokes borked.</p>
<p>But Malcolm, confirming my belief in the broken-ness of <code>vim</code>,
said “Oh, *that* ‘view’.  I thought it was some sexy Mac ‘view my email’ app”.
D’oh, of course; the magic OS X <code>open</code> command does just the right
thing. 
Erm, you might want to run <code>mailgrep</code> before you run
<code>mailview</code>; I’m not sure what would happen if you asked OS X to
open three or four thousand email messages at once.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/21/'>
 <title>FSS: Pink Flowers</title>
 <link href='Dracon-Help' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/21/Dracon-Help</id>
 <published>2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-21T17:19:27-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Friday Slide Scan #28 is two Eighties florals, one interior, one exterior.  With a confession.</div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Friday Slide Scan #28 is two Eighties florals, one interior, one
exterior.  With a confession.</p>
<p>First some spring flowers fallen from a tree, just as now in our front
yard, at dusk.</p>
<img src="0506.png" alt="Fallen pink treeflowers on grass at dusk" />
<p>I’m not sure what these are, but look at the light in the center.  Rewards
enlarging.</p>
<img src="0713.png" alt="Flowers in shadow with light in background" />
<p>Here’s the confession.  Sometimes on Fridays when I’m feeling kinda
burned-out, I knock off work and do these slide scans in the office, because
this is where I have the
<a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/04/14/MineIsBigger">big
screen</a>.
Blowing these pictures up to mega-huge, picking away at the old-slide crud and
scanning artifacts, tinkering with the colour balance, and listening; I never
play music while I’m writing or coding seriously, but I play it real loud while
photo-editing.  It’s all pretty well pure pleasure; you just can’t imagine
how good that second one above looks at near-native size.
It reconstitutes the part of my mind that I earn my living with; that’s my
story and I’m sticking to it.</p>
<p>Images in the Friday Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1953
and 2003 by (in rough chronological order)
<a href="http://www.textuality.com/BillBray/">Bill Bray</a>, 
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/11/MomsGarden">Jean Bray</a>, Tim Bray, Cath
Bray, and
<a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren Wood</a>; when I know
exactly who took one, I’ll say; in this case, at least one is by Cath Bray.
Most but not all of the slides were on Kodachrome; they were digitized using
a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED scanner and cleaned up by a combination of the Nikon
scanning software and PhotoShop Elements.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/20/'>
 <title>Spring Pix</title>
 <link href='Spring-Pix' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/20/Spring-Pix</id>
 <published>2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-20T23:07:10-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/Vancouver' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Vancouver' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />
 <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Three pictures around Vancouver; one of a fresh green springtime tree, two of rotten old buildings being torn down.</div></summary>
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Three pictures around Vancouver; one of a fresh green springtime tree, two
of rotten old buildings being torn down.</p>
<p>There’s nothing quite as fresh as just-sprouted deciduous leaves;
another few weeks and this tree will be just a tree.</p>
<img src="IMG_4656.png" alt="Sunlit fresh young leaves" />
<p>I have a thing about demolition.
The first is a rotten dingy old one-story on Main Street near 23rd, the second
is an unlovely grey mid-rise being torn down to build still more condos at
Homer and Helmcken.</p>
<img src="IMG_4665.png" alt="Demolition site on Main Street, Vancouver" />
<img src="IMG_4671.png" alt="Demolition site at Homer and Helmcken, Vancouver" />
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/20/'>
 <title>Totten&#x2019;s Trip</title>
 <link href='Totten-on-Iraq' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/20/Totten-on-Iraq</id>
 <published>2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-20T21:05:22-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/Middle East' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Middle East' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p><a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/">Michael J. Totten</a> is a
journalist and blogger who’s back and forth to the 
Middle East and writes about it, quite well in my opinion; he supports this by
freelancing and with his blog’s tip jar.  He gets lots of
link love from the right-wing blogosphere, which is puzzling because Totten is
balanced and clear-eyed and doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind.
Recently, he and a friend were 
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001117.html">having fun in
Istanbul</a> and, on a random drive out into the country, decided on impulse to
keep going, all the way across Turkey and into Iraq; into the Kurdish
mini-state in Iraq’s north, to 
be precise.  It makes a heck of a story, with lots of pictures, in six parts:
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001119.html">I</a>,
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001120.html">II</a>,
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001121.html">III</a>,
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001124.html">IV</a>,
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001126.html">V</a>, and
<a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001127.html">VI</a>.
</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/19/'>
 <title>The Cost of AJAX</title>
 <link href='The-Cost-of-AJAX' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/19/The-Cost-of-AJAX</id>
 <published>2006-04-19T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-20T00:37:46-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>James Governor
<a href="http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001526.html">relays a
question</a> that sounds important
but I think is actively dangerous: do AJAX apps present more of
a server-side load?  The question is dangerous because it’s meaningless and
unanswerable.  Your typical Web page will, in the process of
loading, call back to the server for a bunch of stylesheets and graphics and
scripts and so on: for example, this <span class='o'>ongoing</span> page calls
out to three different graphics, one stylesheet, and one JavaScript file.
It also has one “AJAXy” XMLHttpRequest call.
From the server’s point of view, those are all just requests to dereference
one URI or another.  In the case
of <span class='o'>ongoing</span>, the AJAX request is for a static file less
than 200 bytes in size (i.e. cheap).
On the other hand, it could have been for something that required a
complex outer join on two ten-million-row tables (i.e. <em>very</em>
expensive).  And one of the virtues of 
the Web Architecture is that it hides those differences, the “U” in URI stands
for “Uniform”, it’s a Uniform interface to a resource on the Web that could
be, well, anything.
So saying “AJAX is expensive” (or that it’s cheap) is like saying “A mountain
bike is slower than a battle tank” (or that it’s faster).  
The truth depends on what you’re doing with it. 
In the case of web sites, it depends on how many fetches you do and
where you have to go to get the data to satisfy them.
<span class='o'>ongoing</span> is a pretty quick web site, even though it runs
on a fairly modest server, but
that has nothing to do with AJAX-or-not; it’s because of the particular way
I’ve set up the Web resources that make the pages here.
I’ve
<a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/14/AJAX-Performance">argued elsewhere</a>
that AJAX can be a performance win, system-wide; but that argument too is
contingent on context, lots of context.</p>
</div></content></entry>

<entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/18/'>
 <title>Hao Wu and Graham McMynn</title>
 <link href='Hao-Wu' />
 <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/18/Hao-Wu</id>
 <published>2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00</published>
 <updated>2006-04-18T22:00:40-08:00</updated>
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/China' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='China' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Politics' />
 <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Politics' />
<content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<p>Graham McMynn is a teenager who was kidnapped in Vancouver on April 4th and
freed, in a large, noisy, and
<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/national/2006/04/12/bcabduction060412.html">newsworthy</a>
police operation, on April 12th.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hao_Wu">Hao Wu</a> is a Chinese
film-maker and
<a href="http://beijingorbust.blogspot.com/">blogger</a> who was kidnapped in
Beijing on February 22nd in a 
small, quiet police operation not intended to be newsworthy, and who has not
been freed.
Read about it
<a href="http://spaces.msn.com/wuhaofamily/">here</a>,
<a href="http://ethanzuckerman.com/haowu/">here</a>, and
<a href="http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/freehaowu/index.html">here</a>.
Making noise about it <em>might</em> influence the government of China to
moderate its actions against Mr. Wu, and can’t do any harm.
Mr. McMynn’s kidnappers were a gaggle of small-time hoodlums, one of whom was
out on bail while awaiting trial for another kidnapping (!).
Mr. Wu’s were police.
In a civilized country, the function of the police force is to deter such
people and arrest them.  A nation where they are the same people?   Nobody
could call it “civilized”.</p> 
</div></content></entry>

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